I'll start by going back to May 29th. Submission day. Presentation day.
Amazingly, I had somehow managed to get all of my work done with nearly two days to spare and it felt really good. I don't quite know how I did it, because a week before, I was very worried that I wouldn't get it finished on time and then it just sort of all fit into place. So, on Tuesday morning, I headed to Uni and handed in all of my work.
Everyone handed their work in at the same time, so there was a total of around 70 people all within the same room, bustling about and trying to submit stuff. Many people looked very tired. A few hadn't slept at all and had been working throughout the night to get things finished in time. One such person was John, who told me that he had done exactly this and it showed. I was glad I wasn't one of them.
Last semester, I almost didn't manage to submit my work due to silly errors in creating PDFs. However, this submission went fine and I even managed to submit my work before most of the rest did. However, I stayed behind while the likes of Tom submit theirs.
Both he and his group wanted to get together to think about what they were going to say in their presentation, which was taking place at 11am the same day. I tagged along and we went to one of the computer rooms. In there was Emilie and I talked to her inbetween talking to Tom and his team, consisting of Danny and a girl named Louise who I thought was rather cute. After a while, more people came in who wanted to rehearse what they were going to say for the presentation too.
I felt a bit annoyed that my team hadn't wanted to rehearse what we were going to say for our presentation, but felt confident that at least for my part, I had it memorised. I had been repeating it both out loud and in my head for the last ten days to make sure I got it right. I was fairly confident.
We stayed in the computer room right up until 11am and then headed to where we would be presenting it. Upon entering the room, I was quite surprised at how much smaller it was. I had expected it to be bigger. Inside, there was room for roughly 100 people, maybe a few more, all facing a large projector screen. Once everyone had turned up, Kevin, my tutor turned out the lights and begun to call teams up to present their interactive website.
As I said, there are roughly 70 people on my course and each group had three people in. Needless to say, we were there for quite some time. The presentations started at 11am and went on until 1pm at which point we had a break.
Up until that point, I hadn't really seen anything that had impressed me aside from the very first presentation which was Zef's. Although he'd only managed to get the first page complete, it was visually rich and I could easily imagine what the rest of the site would look like if he had had a chance to complete it. If he did complete it, it would have definitely took the first spot in my head. However, because he only had one page, I was still very confident that ours - mine - would win over.
Brian, who was also in the lecture theatre along with Kevin was so harsh on so many of the teams. He was saying stuff that no one else agreed with him on, yet he got away with it because he was the tutor. In particular, I felt he was harsh on people due to their limited knowledge of Flash, which most people had never touched before and only had eight weeks to come up with something. Eight weeks isn't enough to go from completely new to completely skilled.
I knew it wasn't a competition, but in a professional environment, it would be. Everyone in the room would be my competitors and I'd have to outdo every one of them to get the job. And that's how I saw it. Luckily, I saw nothing that impressed me and was confident ours would impress everyone else.
Just before the break, Mike, the technician came over to me and told me that our group were next up. I was both nervous and excited.
When everyone came back, the lights were switched out once more and Kevin called our team down to the front. It's quite daunting standing in front of 70 people, all staring back at you, waiting for you to essentially entertain them for ten minutes.
I attempted to compose myself and then shouted over to Kevin, who was sitting at the very back of everyone.
"Shall I start, Kevin?", I asked, hinting to the audience that I was indeed ready to start.
"Ok everyone quiet please", he said.
And I began.
"Hello, my name is Neil Martin", I said, before Tom Scott introduced himself as did Ben Scott.
"And this", I said, "Is Oasis".
And with that, Ben clicked the play button and the 70 second introduction that I had worked on for 12 hours began playing.
I didn't look up at the projector while it was playing to begin with, instead, I looked out into the audience to see people's reactions.
"H2O Proudly Presents:", the intro read, as the cinematic music played. And then "OASIS" faded in accompanied by the music.
Everyone laughed. But not in a "That's so stupid" way, but in a "Hey, this isn't bad!" way. And Zef, the guy who I think has some of the best talent on the course even gave me applause!
I stood there smiling as the rest of the intro played and got to the final crescendo again and once more, a laugh echoed around the lecture theatre. I felt like those 12 hours of work creating just 70 seconds of animation had been worth it.
I then began with my section of the presentation and managed to say it all from my head without a single error.
"I'll now hand you over to Tom Scott", I said, as my final words and he began his piece. However, neither he nor Ben had any words planned so everything they were saying sounded redundant and uninformative. No one else had prepared anything to say either, so it wasn't like they were the exception, it was me. However, I knew that what I had said was justifiable because I had written it down and actually read it first. This wasn't so with everyone else and it made listening to them sound boring.
I had told both Tom and Ben not to say anything negative at all when they were talking, but sure enough, Ben did. It wasn't too bad though.
Once we were finished, we incurred the wrath of Brian, as had every other team before us. I was ready for him though. Or at least I thought I was.
"The first thing I thought of when I saw that", he said, referring to the model of the ship itself, "was a hoover attachment". Everyone laughed and though a little offended that that's the only thing he could point out, had to laugh too, considering it did slightly.
Aside from that, he also commented on how the site was focussed on a male market and said something along the lines of "How does this appeal to nest builders?" to which I replied with a stupid sarcastic remark that wasn't funny at all in retrospect. He also commented on how we'd got one of the dates wrong on the timeline we had incorporated into the site. But he said it in such a smug way, pointing out one of the only things wrong. That's not even an error with the site itself, but simply a fact that we got wrong. A fact for a fictional site.
You could hear the overall groan when he began to go on about how we had gotten it wrong. It wasn't quite a silence in the audience, but rather a sense that everyone else was currently sharing both Tom's, Ben's and my annoyance, since they had had to endure the same kind of nitpicking.
When he was finally finished, Kevin asked the audience if there were any more questions.
"Yeah", Zef said, "can we see the intro again?"
Needless to say, I was rather happy to get an encore!
So, once again, it my 70 second introdution was played. No other team got such an encore. And when our team was clapped off the stage area once we were finished (as was every other team), I felt like my work was complete. I had achieved something I had not achieved before and I was confident that no one was going to beat our site for being visually appealing. I believe our site out of the 22 or so sites would work best as a real world site because it looks far more professional than any other.
The rest of the sites were presented and they finally finished around 2pm. Just before we were allowed to go however, Brian came to the front of the stage and played my introduction for a third time. I hadn't seen it played on the projector yet from a proper viewing distance and though it may sound big headed, watching it was so cool. Seeing it on a huge projector screen, with the cinematic music being played throughout the theatre was great. I had known it might get a good response, but sitting there and watching it again from where everyone else had been watching it, I realised why Zef had clapped and why everyone else had enjoyed it too.
I was both dreading and looking forward to my presentation, but by the end of it, I felt vindicated. Compared to the rest of the sites, ours has to get a fair number of marks.
After the presentations, me and Tom went for a drink in the SU to celebrate the end of University for the Summer. What would follow are two consecutive nights out, something which I've never done before. But that's for the next entry.
